Oscar Grant III, Adolph Grimes III and the Outmoded Outrage Debate

There's a heated--yet very unenlightening--debate happening in the blogosphere about the shooting of an unarmed black man named Oscar Grant III by transit police in Oakland, California.

At The Daily Beast, Stanley Crouch writes
that "the left" isn't outraged by black on black crime but police brutality instead. Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates is outraged at the outrage from those who think that blacks aren't sufficiently outraged by black on black crime. Writes Coates:

"I spent most of last year following Bill Cosby around to standing room only rallies in Detroit, Birmingham and Baltimore, talking to people who were pissed off by a variety of social maladies. Number one amongst them all -- the murder rate among black men."

[More...]

Coates is right: there is plenty of outrage in the black community over the murder rate among young black men. Here in New Orleans, for example, one of the most prominent anti-violence voices is a black cop turned pastor named John Rapahel. And Crouch's rant about "the left" is remarkably free of evidence: who on the left, exactly, despises law enforcement and is silent on black on black crime? Crouch doesn't say.

But I think that both Coates and Crouch fall into the same "outrage" trap. When discussing murder rates, police brutality or any other criminal justice issue debating the level of outrage among the black community or "the left"--whatever that means--just isn't very helpful. It's also endlessly debatable: how do we quantify outrage?

Instead of accusing one another of being insufficiently outraged, let's explore what's really going on in communities with high murder rates and the often rampant law enforcement misconduct that accompanies such violence. Here in New Orleans, we kicked off the New Year with three killings on New Year's Day alone. One of those killed was Adolph Grimes III,a 22 year old father who was shot 14 times by the NOPD after he allegedly opened fire on the cops. Grimes' family disputes the NOPD's characterization of the shooting--12 of the 14 shots hit Grimes in the back--and the FBI is investigating the incident.

The New Year's Day carnage is, sadly, typical in New Orleans: our murder rateis about 64 killings per 100,000 people, far higher than even violent cities like Baltimore and Detroit. What makes New Orleans so dangerous? We've got poor public education, poor public health, few social services, high levels of poverty, etc--but I'd also argue that our profoundly dysfunctional criminal justice system plays a huge role in allowing violence to fester. Consider the following: in 2007, when New Orleans' murder rate was well over 80 killings per 100,000 population, a mere 2% of arrests by the NOPD were for violent offenses according to the Metropolitan Crime Commission. Most of the arrests made by the NOPD that year were for misdemeanor drug offenses; indeed, Orleans Parish has one of the highest rates of admission to prison for drug offenses in the entire country. So, in New Orleans, you've got a much better chance of being arrested for selling a bag of weed than getting nabbed for murder. The streets are very aware of this. If you've got a beef with someone, there's no deterrence--other than your own conscience--from blowing them away.

Unfortunately, New Orleans is not alone in its drug war dysfunction: as The Wire's David Simon wrote in a great Time Magazine piece last year: "In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined."

It's no surprise, then, that the cops who shot Adolph Grimes III were part of an NOPD narcotics task force. So when we talk about Adolph Grimes III, or Oscar Grant III let's talk not talk about who is or isn't outraged by police brutality or violence on the streets. Instead, let's talk about how the drug war actually works to destabilize cities like Oakland and New Orleans, let's talk about how our staggering incarceration rates have created a vast and seemingly permanent criminal underclass, and let's alwaystalk about how rising economic inequality has impacted the black community. As economist Marcellus Andrews eloquently put it: “The end of the American segregation system a half century ago put black people onto the blue-collar road to the middle class just when the on-ramp shut down."

It's the ball busting too...you don't meet hardworking detectives out solving murders as often as you meet the highway patrol writing you up for no seat belt, or some beat cop busting your horns over some b.s. "quality of life" bullsh*t. That's the lasting impression you get of law enforcement...a ball buster, not a public servant performing a valuable service.

We need to get the police refocused on solving violent crimes, and off of the revenue generating ticket writing quality of life nonsense that just makes communities dislike and distrust them.

easier and safer for the cops to pick the low hanging fruit. Years ago a friend whose brother was a cop told me that there were people the cops could not touch, so they went after the corner pushers instead. Any doubt that the drugs never dried up?

But one thing I wonder about is if there was so much black male-on-black male violence---were there as many homicides--before the proliferation of 'Drug War' programs and funding?

It seems to me that in my lifetime (53) I've seen a dramatic increase in African American young men dying in urban settings in 'routine' drive by shootings or turf targeting etc. in the last 25 years or so...Does anyone know the statistics on this?

It's sickening the way it seems to have become an accepted part of city landscapes these days in the medium sized cities of upstate New York where I live.

Yes, and that probably goes to my other outrage in this situation: the increasingly youthful population we see in these sad situations. Guns readily in the hands of older children (as opposed to young adults.)

We often talk about young AA MEN being murdered/murdering one another, but, again, here in my neck of the woods the ages of these victims and perpetrators is often in the teenage range. Young MEN who are 15, 16, 17 and yeah, even 18 years old.

I contrast this characterization of them in the press and in the CJ system with the way it's often framed for white males in the more privileged suburbs. Speaking now of drug offenses the urban 'young men' of color often (usually?) get the heftier treatment of adult status while the 'young men' of lesser color in the burbs are more often than not assigned YO status and shunted into a juvenile program with sealed records and treatment options and limited punitive outcomes.

Race is in the forefront. No doubt about it. But it's pretty obvious that class trumps it or is, at least, right there welded to it.

In my corner of upstate. we saw this charming little drama play out this year: a former police chief who was long rumored to have drug problems while in office exposed as a significant player in an upstate/downstate drug ring.

Definitely things got a lot worse in the 80s. Reaganomics and white flight destroyed the inner-city and left ybm in the dust. In the early 90s it was pretty bad, but there were a large number of "crack-downs" (pun intended) that put a lot of people in jail. The mid/late 90s was actually pretty good. In my city we had an 18 month (I think) period where no one under the age of 18 was murdered, called the "Boston miracle".

Then, in the last 5 years or so, a lot of them got out of jail. And SHOCKINGLY (not really) jail did not re-habilitate but in fact created worse criminals, who then "train" the youth today. Hence the spike we've seen in the last few years.

I made a lot of assumptions on the dates, but the general plot is true.

can be a distraction from the underlying issue you're supposed to be outraged about, but I still think it is worth-while to examine these things.

I feel like we've spent a lot of time in the last year arguing about why "the left" cares more about racial discrimination than gender discrimination or more about gender descrimination than gay rights, etc. based on the perceived level of "outrage" at any given incident. Still, I feel that we have to have these dialogues to open people's eyes about how much more can be accomplished when we join each other's causes.

Are violent crimes reported?
Do victims of violent crimes report crimes and press charges?
Is there an reluctance to trust and work with the police?
Do people prefer to resolve their problems "privately" instead of using the judicial system?
Is there a culture of vigilantism?

the GLBT community which has its own Domestic Violence hotline. They consistently show more reports of same sex DV than the official police reports do.

Unreported crimes won't be prosecuted, perpetrators won't be arrested but people will still suffer.

Heck, I know someone who lives in a high crime area who has stopped filing police reports for thefts and B&Es because he's afraid of losing his home owner's insurance - even though he doesn't file insurance claims.

NOLA, Detroit and Baltimore would be non-violent cities? Or even one of our country's less-violent cities?

After decades and decades of talk and plans and ideas and work to "solve" the problem of violence in America, has it worked?

Also, while I agree that you can't measure outrage, and therefor the topic of whose outrage is more is a non-starter, I will also point out that in the 6 or 7 years or so years I've been hanging out here on TL there have been a multitude of stories of police brutality but nary a single one on black on black brutality.

Lastly, one of my wife's HS best friends used to be married a NO cop. We hung out with him in the French Quarter during Mardi Gras one day and he "jacked up" (his term) some tourists as they walked by and took their bead necklaces so that my wife could have them.

I can only imagine what the cops there do when they're not in plain view of the public...

are numerous and do include the drug war. But I would also point out inferior public schools, lack of jobs, and lack of successful role models/mentors. For black in particular, the officially sanctioned housing segregation that persisted for many years was especially harmful. (The seamy underbelly of HOLC was redlining.)

Seriously, of course you're right about the challenges inner cities face.

Those challenges have been clearly identified well publicized for decades and decades now, and for decades and decades now massive amounts of money and time and effort have been spent to solve those challenges, and yet those challenges continue essentially unaffected today.

Our War on Inner City Violence, etc., has been as equally unsuccessful as our War on Drugs.

is organized crime's need for red shirts, expendable grunts. Poverty, lack of education and lack of opportunity help to ensure a steady supply of recruits. It's hardly in their interest to provide jobs and education.

it's pretty well established that the war on poverty and Great Society did a lot to mitigate some of the worst features of inner-city misery. We just weren't able to solve everything (mostly because of the nature of the Democratic coalition until recently).

when you have two polar opposite programs in place (war on poverty/war on drugs), it should come as no particular surprise that both are gigantic failures. the war on drugs guarantees the failure of the war on poverty.

Here're some useful statistics on school spending, which may or may not be a reasonable indicator of how & whether "X" or "2X" dollars thrown at a problem may resolved it--Sourcebook:
New Hampshire $10,792
New Jersey 14,675
New Mexico 9,036
New York 14,206
North Carolina 8,000
North Dakota 8,228
Ohio 10,563

It appears as if defining New Jersey as "X" leads to the observation that states which spend about 60 or 70 percent of "X" don't seem to impress the world with academic achievement, college entrance numbers, or other indicators of successful schools.

District of Columbia $16,540, by far the highest in the nation, yet DC's violent crime rate remains appallingly high.

NJ has the 2nd highest spending in the nation behind DC, how's the violent crime rate in, say, Newark or Camden, NJ? Shouldn't they be among our safest cities? If you spent 2X the school spending/student there these would then be our safest cities?

My factoids are only directed at the financial statistics, in the sense that there is very little evidence that any jurisdiction has ever spent 2X on education.

That there may be some linkage between spending per pupil on education & public safety would be very nearly the strangest juxtaposition ever put forward.

Putting 100,000 cops on the street back in the early 90s seemed to reduce crime. It seems silly to suggest that putting 100,000 teachers in the schools would reduce crime. The teachers might improve SAT scores.

Your per pupil cost response is to my comment on Johnson's poverty program--click on "parent" of your post. Yours is not a reply to andgarden's laundry list of inner city problems, but very specifically to my generalization that the money spent on inner cities, for anything, has never been anywhere close to X, much less 100,000X.

It seems you're not following the sequence of your own comments in the thread.

I replied to your cost figures per student with factual information & a link. And, generally, there is no correlation between per pupil school spending & violence, although I didn't choose to argue with that implication.

...to talk about this without addressing the snitches-get-stitches stuff. FWIW, I in no way support current drug laws and my general faith in police departments is far less than overwhelming, but it seems there is a snitches-get... aspect to this.

of outrage, it can sometimes be measured by a community's public response, sometimes by the response of just one person who is determined to take on the issue. Whether it's Watts or Selma, Oakland or Chicago, Kent State or Philadelphia, you don't get much change without outrage.

- outrage over the end result of the problems vs. root-cause analysis of why the problems exist in the first place. I can understand why Stanley Crouch is upset at the apparent lack of outrage, his generation was neck-deep in the civil rights era and it's tactics. Unfortunately, (and sadly) folks just ain't that committed anymore. Which is why neither outrage or root-cause analysis get much traction. When you have to worry about paying the rent, what some knucklehead down the block does loses it's import.

Unfortunately, New Orleans is not alone in its drug war dysfunction: as The Wire's David Simon wrote in a great Time Magazine piece last year: "In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime -- murder, rape, aggravated assault -- have declined."

This is the first time I've ever heard this fact. I don't believe I have ever once heard it reported on tv or cable news. It could be that I'm just amazingly ignorant in this area. But I do consume a large amount of news and articles. And I had no idea this was the case.

This information has to become common knowledge, or we will never be able to change it. Thanks for enlightening me.

over the-left's-lack-of-outrage argument is that when we do express the outrage -- especially us white folks on the left -- we are sometimes accused of pandering, patronizing or simply faking it. I've been told that while my heart may be in the right place, I don't understand institutional racism because I'm a priveleged white person and I don't have enough experience in "communities of color". Talk about being patronized to. Being a liberal is irrelevant when you're charged with being an unacknowledged racist and part of the problem.

And if I don't reflexively hate the police, well, then I get it from all sides.

I try to look at each incident and situation within both small and larger contexts. But often the facts aren't known right away, especially when the media is working its own agenda on a crime story.

All that aside, I have to admit I don't put much stock in anything Stanley Crouch says. Probably because I think HE is a racist. As a long-time reader of Jazz Times, I will not forget his tirades against white critics, white producers and white musicians. His villification of Dave Douglas reached epic proportions when he went to the club where Douglas was playing, sat in the front row and viciously heckled him all night long.

But of course, we ought to be more concerned about agents of the state killing people than about citizens killing each other. You'd think a conservative would understand that, but we don't have very many real conservatives any more